From Pop Star To Startup Boss: The Story of Stageit's Evan Lowenstein

This story appears in the December 24, 2012 issue of Forbes.
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The first developer he approached wanted $1,200 to create Stageit's site. He took the $600 advance and seven pages of diagrams, then stopped returning calls. When Lowenstein caught up with him, he claimed he'd tossed the plans and dared him to sue (he was broke).

Developer number two seemed more legit, with a price tag to match: $57,500. After a few months, though, Lowenstein still hadn't seen any progress. The prototype site he wheedled from the group crashed whenever more than 20 people logged on.

Third time wasn't much of a charm, either. A firm that had done projects for Boeing claimed it could salvage the existing site and have it running in two months--for $88,000. But it soon ran into "unforeseeable problems," and Lowenstein was in the hole yet again.

By 2010 he'd blown through his savings and hadn't paid himself in nine months. His 18-hour days left him no time for his wife and kids. He'd had two hospitalizations for mysterious stomach ailments. Still, he decided he had to work on the Sabbath and "broke up with God." Says Buffett: "Sometimes you gotta go, 'Hey, take a battery out.'"

Lowenstein simply recharged. In January he found four programmers who rebuilt the site for $240,000 of the cash he had raised from early investors. By March he had something usable and took Stageit live. "We were still a plane flying at 500 feet," he says. "One bounce of turbulence would put us on the ground."

Indeed, when Crosby Stills & Nash performed a Stageit charity show that summer, the site went down. Lowenstein offered to refund his customers' cash--and while many declined, he nearly couldn't pay his staff. He convinced his brother to write a check for $175,000. That bought him new servers, a cloud-hosted chat program and much-needed respiration room.

"He was passionate," Braun says. "I felt comfortable making the introduction." By the end of 2011 Lowenstein had raised $2.5 million and decided to take a vacation.

Not for long, thanks to bigger and more established rivals. Livestream and Ustream broadcast everything from concerts to local TV, charging premium users upfront monthly fees of $49 to $999 (that's for a terabyte's worth of video storage). Both sites let users archive videos. Lowenstein thinks that cheapens the product, and others agree. "The music industry does itself a disservice by commoditizing its craft," says Mark Lieberman, founder of Artists Den, which films big names in tiny historic venues and sells the DVDs online.

With a paper valuation last pegged at $16 million, half of it his, Lowenstein has no thoughts of retiring to Margaritaville. As an entrepreneur, he says, "you're an idiot that doesn't know when to quit--until you have a breakthrough. Then everyone calls you a genius. I'm no genius, and the future of our business remains to be seen. But I'm still holding on."